Parsedhtml Doesnt Respond Anymore

So I'm trying to get some text from a website, and as soon as I try to return an object with ParsedHtml, powershell stops responding (even when I let it run in the background a few

Solution 1:

From Invoke-WebRequest reference page on docs.microsoft.com:

This parameter has been deprecated. Beginning with PowerShell 6.0.0, all Web requests use basic parsing only. This parameter is included for backwards compatibility only and any use of it has no effect on the operation of the cmdlet.

and a more detailed explanation from MS staff comment on PowerShell Github repository Issue #2867:

Windows PowerShell relied on Internet Explorer to parse the html. Since Internet Explorer wasn't available in most platforms we support with PowerShell Core 6 (nanoserver, Linux, macOS), it made sense to default to -UseBasicParsing. @MSAdministrator's proposal for ConvertFrom-Html is a better solution rather than marrying the parsing capability to the web cmdlets (like parsing a local html file). and later: Seems that the community has helped fill in this gap with modules on PowerShellGallery to specifically handle parsing html.

And today there does not seem to be a ConvertFrom-Html, so I guess your choices are: PowerShell Gallery modules that provide parsing, or a limited alternative follows. It looks like they won't give you the ParsedHTML property per se, but they do give you some traversable/structured content that might serve your purposes:

https://stackoverflow.com/a/53878303/537243

In very, very limited circumstances you could try and make use of the way that "html is a subtype of xml", but xml parser will get confused and fail with a lot of syntax "deviations" permitted in html, so the source has to be very regular and very vanilla:

$webresponse = Invoke-WebRequest -Uri "https://w3.org"
$xmldoc = [xml]$webresponse.Content
write-output $xmldoc.html.body.div[0].div.h1.span |select'#text'